As difficult as the Mumford & Sons GOTR Tour was to dish up for the city of St. Augustine, it’s been a powerful process to digest as well.

City Manager John Regan sat down with The Record last week to go over the nearly-final profit and loss numbers. And we talked about the concert.

What worked?

Transportation: Regan says the biggest success story was the shuttle system, first because it really worked. Second, because it made money. The system was designed to be profitable.

The model was based on selling 10,000 shuttle wristbands; 11,400 were sold. Staff rode herd over the 90 buses and the 135 people it took to move visitors around efficiently. The Northeast Florida Regional Airport was absolutely key to diffusing downtown parking issues and Regan says he’s never worked with a better group of people.

Life and safety systems: The vast majority of the medical problem at the concert were dehydration; not surprising when a bottle of beer cost $11. In all, rescue personnel saw about 250 concert-goers. Several were taken to the hospital but none had real injuries.

Law enforcement made one arrest Friday night and tossed out a rowdy guest Saturday night. The Unified Command Center worked better than expected with cooperation from the Sheriff’s deputies and St. Augustine and Beach police officers.

Residential parking: This was one of the biggest concerns the city had going in. It may have been tone of the nicer surprises coming out. “Protecting the residents with neighborhood control systems was crucial to the overall plan,” Regan said.

Judging by input to the The Record, the residents in neighborhoods close to Francis Field that were the most vocal bloc of opposition. By the time the city got its message out to neighborhood groups, that was changing. It was a good plan that allowed residents in but kept tourists out. “Protecting the neighborhoods worked better than expected, but it was costly,” Regan said.

Secondary acts: Regan was proud of the satellite entertainment the city provided outside the confines of Francis Field. “There was a little something for everybody,” he said. You didn’t have to have go to Mumford to enjoy the weekend. Truth be told, the stage at City Hall was a beautiful venue and one that ought to get an encore soon. It was an experiment that went well. Regan said that Flagler College expressed interest in becoming a venue.

Staff: Regan said that while it wasn’t a surprise, he was most proud of the work of his staff: “I learned a lot about the people who work for me.” City personnel took the lead in the seven-month effort to pull the concert off. But other groups were involved and in the trenches from the start. It’s safe to say that the best investment made by the city was hiring St. Augustine Amphitheatre general manager Ryan Murphy and his crew from St. Johns County for technical expertise that no one but they could have provided.

What didn’t work

Regan says the economic impact of the concert turned out to be unbalanced. While lodging and bars did well, merchants were less profitable. It was also true, and should have been expected, that the farther a business was from ground zero, the less it would be affected financially.

Transportation: Yes it worked smoothly, but in hindsight Regan says it may have been too smooth. All of the shuttling was concentrated on the garage which got folks to and from the concert efficiently, but ended up “brutally efficient” for the merchants. “They (the visitors) got out too fast.”

Parking Garage: The parking garage was an integral part of the transportation system plan. But it barely played a supporting role in reality. The top floor of the garage was sold out to the promoters, but few concert-goers paid the $30 a day fee. That’s probably a good thing because, had it filled, up there sill might be some folks trapped inside. A good strategy next time might be to let folks in for free, but charge them $30 a head to get back out. That’s one for the drawing board for sure. Revenues during the concert were about equal to the same weekend last year with no concert.

Lessons learned

What do we take away from all this? Regan says there’s plenty.

If the city tackles another event, Regan says that traffic and parking closures would be much less restrictive. “We were too careful on that. There was downtown parking not being used.”

The garage will take some thinking. But part of that plan should be to keep the bottom floor empty in case of bad weather at the field. Law enforcement was eight minutes away from stopping the concert Saturday night when big storms blew by just north of town.

Pulling off the Mumford event this time was a gut-wrenching possibility. Now something similar is a probability.

Regan says that the Mumford concert was never intended as a money-maker. But I suspect that he and everyone involved are doing cartwheels over the fact that came out so close to the black. It was a big gamble.

He said that the worst case scenario would have been “If the event was horrible and we made a lot of money.”

That said, he and others on the team believe that’s just what can happen in the future — with the city acting as promoter and keeping those dollars at home.

“We’re a lot smarter as an institution” Regan said.

But he’s is clear about the future of similar events in the future. We have an amazing venue here. Few cities can touch it. But it may not be rock concerts the city looks at down the road. “We can now pursue or plan events that fit the strategy of the city.” And these would more likely be cultural events perhaps in line with the 450th celebration coming up.

The Mumford experience has given the city some experience and confidence. It’s positioned to take advantage of only the smartest events designed to compliment our history, heritage or general aspirations.

We have what they want.

Police Chief Loran Lueders may have said it best at a de-briefing two weeks ago at City Hall: “We’re not the ugly kid in the corner. We don’t have to jump every time somebody wants us to dance.”

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This article puts a nice "gloss" on Mumford---but misses the core question. Why put seven months of City Staff time (which is not accounted for in the costs) and significant dollars into staging a concert (where the City made a poor business deal with the promoters)? So the City could "learn some lessons"? How did staging "fiestas" as Mayor Boles puts it, rise to the top of City priorities? This is another example of a City Commission that grasps at any "shiny new thing" that passes by. I am glad to see candidates with the right kind of expertise participating in the next election. And it might be time to appoint Boles "Grand Vizier"--so he can head up parades (where he looks great), but get him out of City government.

The city doesn't have to make money on every thing that happens in St. Augustine. The people of St. Augustine pay plenty of taxes every year so its nice once in a while to have something done for the locals and not geared toward tourists.